The woman who opened the door had silver hair, pale blue eyes, and one hand pressed over her mouth like she was looking at something impossible.
“Rosalie,” she breathed.
I actually flinched. “Who are you?”
“Caroline.” She kept staring, like she couldn’t quite believe I was real. “Frank called me last month. He could barely get the words out. He said you might come one day.”
“Might?”
“He was hoping he’d finally find the courage to send you.” She stepped back from the door. “I think you’d better come in.”
Every instinct told me to turn around and drive straight back to the hospital. I went inside anyway.
“Tell me what he lied about,” I said.
Caroline didn’t answer right away. She opened a drawer beside the stove and set it in front of me — a small collection of metal cookie cutters. A heart. A flower. A little rabbit. An apple. And one small, battered star.
I stopped breathing. It was identical to the one Frank had used every Sunday of my life.
“Where did you get that?”
“It was Frank’s.”
“No — his is at my house. I have it.”
“He had two, dear,” Caroline said gently.
Beneath the cutters was a photograph. She lifted it out and handed it to me with both hands, like it was something fragile.
A little girl stood beside a kitchen table, grinning down at a plate of star-shaped apple pancakes. She couldn’t have been more than five. Frank stood behind her, younger, thinner, and happier than I had ever once seen him in my life.
“Who is she?”
Caroline’s voice shook. “Her name was Miley.”
The room seemed to tilt around that single word.
“Frank was married before your mother,” she went on. “Miley was his daughter.”
My fingers dug into the edges of the photo. “Where is she now?”
Caroline’s eyes dropped. “She died. She was five.”
The words landed soft, which somehow made them land harder.
“There was an accident, at a lake. It happened fast. Frank blamed himself for years, even though there was nothing anyone could have done.”
I sat down because my legs had stopped agreeing to hold me up.
“Why would he hide that from me?”
“After Miley died, his marriage came apart,” Caroline said. “He stopped talking to almost everyone. Stopped returning my calls, and we’d been close for years. He packed away every photograph, every toy, anything that would remind him he’d once been someone’s father.”
